Saturday 4 April 2015

Priorities


There's a sharp difference of opinion over the worth of a particular story between the BBC and Sky News websites. 

The lead story on the BBC website is:
Ed Miliband is to unveil a Labour plan to encourage banks to fund 125,000 new homes for first time-buyers in England.
Sky does report that but places it down at 9th place in its running order, and places a somewhat unflattering angle on it:
Labour is planning to use £5bn invested in savers' accounts to build 125,000 new homes over the course of the next parliament.
 The other two big stories on the BBC News website are:
Sturgeon denies 'preferring Cameron'
SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon denies a newspaper's claim she told a French diplomat she would prefer David Cameron to Ed Miliband as prime minister.
Public 'back tax rises to fund NHS'
A majority of people in Britain support tax rises as a way of funding the NHS ahead of cuts to other public services, a poll suggests.
For Sky News, the main stories are:
Sturgeon Denies Secretly Backing Cameron For PM
The SNP leader says claims she told a diplomat Ed Miliband was not "prime minister material" are "100% untrue".
Kenya University Massacre: Five Arrested
The arrests come as terror group Al Shabaab claims responsibility and vows a "long and gruesome war" on Kenya.
Family Had Concerns Over 'Syria-Bound' Brit
Waheed Ahmed, 21, is set to be deported along with eight other family members who were stopped by Turkish authorities.
Special Report: On Board IS-Fighting Warship
Sky News gets rare access to the USS Carl Vinson - the US vessel leading the fight against Islamic State in the Persian Gulf.

4 comments:

  1. For the BBC the death of 140 plus young people in an attack by "phantom militants" of no fixed abode or ideology in a fellow Commonwealth country is of absolutely no news value. Whereas the disappearance of three schoolgirls on a "Jihad Jaunt" has to be the no. 1 story for at least a month.

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    1. Again, that BBC editorial integrity, much beloved of BBC complaints personnel, who take it as a matter of unshakeable belief, comes to the fore.

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  2. The BBC website today only mentioned in the last sentence of the report on the Kenya massacre that the victims were Christians, almost as an afterthought.

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  3. Nobody seems to want to guess what Sturgeon might actually have said that would have gotten mistranslated that way. I'm having a hard time coming up with something. Unless maybe she said something like a Tory-led Government wouldn't be the worst thing in the world because it would suit the independence agenda better than the other option, and the Frenchman placed more emphasis on that than he should have. But it's pretty hard to mistranslate a French verb into "prefer", when they have it themselves.

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